Your best people are getting exponentially better with AI. Your SEO expert is 10x more productive. Your top analyst generates insights in minutes that used to take days. Your star content creator produces work that used to require a team.
However, here’s the brutal truth: individual vertical productivity is not equivalent to organizational horizontal capability.
When your top performer discovers a breakthrough approach, that discovery dies with them. Perhaps they document it on a Notion page that nobody reads. Maybe they try to explain it in a meeting where colleagues nod but can’t replicate their process. It adds perhaps it to the roadmap for “Q3 if priorities don’t shift.”
The innovation remains trapped. Your organization has superhuman individuals, but you haven’t built institutional capability. When your expert is on vacation, the capability vanishes. When they leave the company, years of learning walk out the door.
This is why most companies report no material earnings contribution from their gen AI initiatives. They’re optimizing for individual vertical productivity without any mechanism to translate it into horizontal scale.
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